I received an email that appeared to be a response to a craigslist posting I made. The email said to open the Word document with the supplied password for the contact information. As soon as I saw that I pictured the goofy robot with it’s arms flailing saying “Danger Will Robinson. DANGER, DANGER”, or the weird fish guy saying “It’s a trap!!”. Here is how to identify these traps. Continue reading →

HowtoGeek just published a warning about SourceForge bundling crapware with downloads.

The freeware/trialware environment has changed radically for the worse over the last few years. What was once a place where you could download legitimate free applications has changed. You can download applications, but if you aren’t extremely careful, the application will be bundled with a bunch of malware / crapware that will create havoc with your machine.

Lenovo has been bundling it’s PCs with Superfish. The company claims that there are no issues with this software.

The problem is that Superfish is designed to bypass the security and encryption you get when you visit a site using https. Superfish can then see passwords, bank account details and other personal information. Continue reading →

Chrome had been hijacked on my machine. If I would search google for something, clicking on the google serps resulting in being taken to an order page for the product. For example, I was looking for info on Symantec Endpoint Protection and would get a page to order SEP, not the actual forums from the google serps.

I ran a combo of AVG, Spybot and Malwarebytes. However, the problem would recur. Continue reading →

I have Verizon Fios at my home. I recently upgraded to the 50/25 plan. The speed difference is remarkable.

HOWEVER, for the past week or so, I noticed a serious slowdown. I started looking at www.speedtest.net and speedtest.verizon.net. I was averaging speeds of 10/25. NOTE – the problem I am describing here is not specific to Verizon Fios. You can be a victim of the type of attack listed here regardless of the IP you are using. The attack is known as a DDOS (Distributed Denial of Service). Hacked computers are networked together in what is known as a ‘botnet’. Continue reading →

I was not getting the expected page views and click throughs on some of my sites running adsense. A quick investigation showed that the wrong publisher ID was on my site.

I had been using an extension called J-Google-Adsense to display adsense code. I checked the configuration and my correct code was in the publisher’s ID box. HOWEVER, it was not showing my code on the page. Continue reading →

I’m not sure how, but my verizon Droid-x browser was hijacked today. Every time I started the browser, it took me right to the market to the Badoo app. I’m not sure if the culprit was badoo or a third party.

I have a couple of questions as to exactly how the backup works on Norton 360. I’ve looked at the documentation but the answers aren’t clear. I have the premier edition which gives me about 25 GB of storage.

Some things are not clear. For example, how does the automatic backup actually work? It appears to be an idle time scan. However, it isn’t clear if it needs to do an entire backup or if it can transfer files as they are modified. Continue reading →

My previous post mentioned that I was having assorted problems including the loss of the Voice Command function on my Samsung Saga running Windows Mobile 1.5.

After I had fixed the Voice Command issue, I noticed that my messaging key (in the lower right of the keypad) was not bringing up messaging. I also found that I could not start the messaging app at all. Continue reading →